| This dissertation examines the influence of automobile parking on urban space, municipal government, and downtown businesses in San Francisco, California between 1920 and 1959. Though racial conflicts and de-industrialization are usually blamed for the twentieth-century "urban crisis," contemporary reports from municipalities, businesses, the popular press, and newspapers were preoccupied with another emergency: the competition of too many drivers for too few parking spaces. Curbs could never park enough cars, nor could private firms supply convenient off-street parking cheaply enough for drivers. Downtown retailers feared parking difficulties would deter their best customers, especially affluent women drivers, while municipalities feared losing essential taxes on downtown property.;"The Public-Private City" traces San Francisco's parking problem through four decades. During the 1920s, little action followed the first widespread concerns about downtown parking, which only worsened when motorists ignored unenforceable parking rules. Between 1937 and 1941, after two new bridges increased the influx of drivers, the city banned curb parking, towed illegally-parked cars, and considered installing parking meters. While drivers and businessmen successfully resisted these measures, a privately-financed garage under a retail-district public park demonstrated a public-private solution to downtown's problem. When postwar suburbanization offered alternatives to worsening downtown parking, officials planned huge garages to simultaneously bolster downtown and demolish "blighted" neighborhoods that were draining city finances. Business groups led municipal garage efforts and endorsed curb regulations they earlier opposed. City voters approved a 1947 off-street parking bond; two years later, California gave San Francisco's new Parking Authority eminent domain powers. By the 1950s, the city was seizing sites for garages to be financed, built, and operated by private interests.;My dissertation reveals how intercity competition led municipalities to become business-like entities intent on maximizing revenues. Both parking regulations and municipal parking garages generated city income while benefiting affluent drivers, sometimes at the expense of the city's poorest citizens. Finally, public-private parking illustrates the early use of eminent domain to forcibly transfer land from one private owner to another, re-affirmed in 2005 by the Supreme Court's widely-criticized ruling in Kelo v. New London, Connecticut. |
